Page 73

“I’m going to do lot’s of perspective-y shit on this page!” – Me, roughly a week ago.

God I hate that guy.

As you may know, I’ve switched to digital art at the start of chapter two, using Paint Tool SAI at first, and Manga Studio 5 from page 61 on.

The first attempts were a bit awkward, but I slowly improved. What didn’t improve however, was speed. I actually considered going back to pen and paper for that reason, but then Manga Studio 5 came along.

In Paint Tool SAI, simple things like panels and drawing straight lines were a pain in the ass. Even more difficult: Perspective. This page was the last one I did with SAI and getting the perspective right drove me insane. I actually used a Sketchup 3d model of a train station, but it was still horribly inefficient. That page probably took me the longest out of all the pages I did so far. I didn’t have those kinds of problems on paper, with my trusty ruler.

Now we have this page right here, done in Manga Studio 5 with the help of some perspective rulers. Oh my god, so much easier! So much more… reasonable! It baffles me how I haven’t seen something like this in other programs yet.

Anyway, here’s what my workspace actually looks like:

Aaaa what is going on?

Looks confusing, but that’s just me showing every perspective ruler and every layer at once. Usually you only work with one ruler active at a time.

I can’t recommend this program enough, not only to comic artists. Did I mention MS5’s painting capabilities? Those also handily put almost every other program out there to shame, probably only second to Corel Painter… so there.

Awesome is as awesome does. That’s what I think of the perspective. I’d hate to sound like a speculating conspiracy theorist, but that tower in the backround looks like the one from Page 2. Go! POWERMAN! 😀http://ahs-comic.com/archive/page-2/

I’ve been reading this comic for a while and so far really I enjoy it (kinda at a point where depending how things develop from here it’ll either be my number 1 favourite webcomic for years to come OR something will scare me off reading it) and I’m usually not one to leave comments at all but the mention of Sai brings some stuff up for me.

Mentioning this stuff for the people who read the comments interested in drawing with Sai I’m going to mention some tricks I discovered in Sai to draw straight lines and hollow circles given the main page comment mentioning that being hard, thoughfor all I know they’re probably only good to beginners like me (seriously I’m not good, I tried to draw a frog and someone thought it was a turtle).

1. This may sound blatantly obvious or be bad for a graphics tablet (mine’s currently in good condition but I don’t claim to know how to keep them intact, I’d actually appreciate knowing if it’s bad for a tablet) but on the one I have I was actually able to put a ruler on the tablet and draw straight lines 2. There’s a square selection tool in Sai, if you select an empty square somewhere and use the fill/paint bucket to fill it with black, then use the transform tool or CTRL+T you can then turn it into a really thin and really long rectangle and make a line that way, you can also change the angle of it to get diagonal lines. 3. For A long time I had next to no ability to draw large hollow circles/ovals/ellipses like a characters eye or something but I found a way. If you make the pen tool really big and set it so there’s no gradient edge or anything you can create a big circle over empty space, you can then shrink the pen tool and turn it white or use a similarly set up eraser of a slightly smaller size. you can then do the CTRL+T thing like before to turn it into an oval or something or change the size, and there you have a hollow circle.

I hope this is useful to another beginner somewhere, and that I’m not bothering the artist.

By the Law of Karkat, one must always hate ones future self for unrecognized reasons, but ones future self must hate their past self even more, just as the present self hates THEIR past self even more than their future self.